Like cosmopolitanism and human rights, democracy is 'perhaps best when it is aporetic, when there's a tension between democracy and the democratization of democracy. This tension is constitutive of democracy. Without this tension, there will not be democracy or the democratic. As a form of politics, democracy is essentially contestable. Suggesting otherwise will make democracy post-political: "The desire to expunge contestability from the terms of political inquiry expresses a wish to escape politics. It emerges either as a desire to rationalize public life, placing a set of ambiguities and contestable orientations under the control of a settled system of understandings and priorities, or as a quest to moralize public life thoroughly, bringing all citizens under the control of a consensus which makes politics marginal and unimportant." Conceived post-politically, democracy loses its ability to change the world.